Skyrim, and how PC just won the war.

A

_ALF_

New Member
Christian Discalimer
I am a 24 year old seminary student getting my M.Div.
Skyrim contains content that can be sexual (I have not seen this nor intend to) as well as a system of demons and gods, as well as magic. This system of demons and gods I can see as a good way to fill out a set of mythology, but can be truly unsettling to believers. I have experienced dark materials in the game that is highly unsuitable for anyone who is young in the faith. I have left playing the game praying about an experience that had occurred within the game involving a "daedra". Final comment, there is the ability to capture souls within stones, used to power enchanted weapons, this is not an issue for me, but must be recognized.
Skyrim contains fictional spiritual material that I would not expose to anyone who is spiritually impressionable.


So I played Oblivion back in the day, wasn't a huge fan of the system limitations of the supposedly immersion environment. So when Skyrim came out, I was hesitant to play.

Then Steam showed me the Steam Workshop, a system to safely post, download, and patch free mods for the games.
This system has allowed me to tweak the game, you can get "cheats" if you wish (but I can refrain with ease).

Highlights so far:
1. Graphical tweaks, additions to bump map pretty much anything, fix bad shadows, bad textures, more realistic water, rain, the list goes on.
2. Gameplay tweaks, some mobs dont level past 35 which makes the difficulty of the game drop off, you can find a mod to make them scale better.
3. Totally new content, quests, zones, villiages, npcs, weapon crafting (be careful there, may end up accidentally cheating)
4. Sound tweaks, new ambient sounds for great immersion

All of this piles on top of a game that already comes packed with over 60 hours of content.

Bottom line, DLC can come and go with devs, but systems like Steam Workshop will let you get so much more from your games, for free.

If you have a decent PC and can get Skyrim for 40 on a Steam sale, its a solid investment in time wasting goodness.
 
Mods rock. When a game has a bug or a lousy game play element it's nice not to have to rely on developer's whims to fix it. Not to mention all the extended play time you can get out of a game if you are willing to search out the good mods.

Note: Just adding Skyrim also includes gay marriage. Didn't know it had sexual content though.
 
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Step 1: Lay off QA department.
Step 2: Release unfinished game.
Step 3: Release SDK.
Step 4: Wait while gamers fix broken game.
Step 5: Profit.

No question marks in this plans.

Criticisms aside, I <3 the concept behind the Steam Workshop and have already subscribed to a few Portal 2 levels.
 
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It's quite genius actually. Pretty soon game developers will just be releasing an SDK without a game. Then the community can essentially make the game themselves. Throw in a micro-transaction store that which sells gamer-generated content while taking a healthy cut and they can nearly remove their overhead while maximizing their gains.

Excuse me, I need to go look up how to create an SDK. . .
 
Patriot said:
It's quite genius actually. Pretty soon game developers will just be releasing an SDK without a game. Then the community can essentially make the game themselves. Throw in a micro-transaction store that which sells gamer-generated content while taking a healthy cut and they can nearly remove their overhead while maximizing their gains.
Click to expand...

Ever heard of the Unreal Engine? Replace "community" with "developers" and 'micro-transaction store' with licensing fees, and you've got Epic's rather successful business model. :p

Developing 3rd party systems for developers is really where the good money is at in game development due to not having to worry about the success of a game making/breaking you every single time.
 
Tek7 said:
Step 1: Lay off QA department.
Step 2: Release unfinished game.
Step 3: Release SDK.
Step 4: Wait while gamers fix broken game.
Step 5: Profit.

No question marks in this plans.

Criticisms aside, I <3 the concept behind the Steam Workshop and have already subscribed to a few Portal 2 levels.
Click to expand...

I have noticed you have a negative attitude when it comes to a lot of games. Why is that? What was unfinished about Skyrim exactly? A game the magnitude will have bugs, no matter how much QA you do. A million pairs of eyes will find stuff that 100 don't. Gamers adding content through an SDK isn't fixing it...it's adding content. It does make their game better, but that's a brilliant move as someone else has noted. Adding mods/SDK is not laziness (and even if it is) it's a must-have in today's AAA gaming experience. SimCity 4 is still played today 10 years later BECAUSE of the user created community.

Perhaps I misunderstood you.
 
Sorry. Still sore about Quake 3 not including single-player. :p

But seriously, Skyrim was plagued with bugs. The PS3 version of the game had gamebreaking bugs. PC gamers didn't suffer nearly as badly. I know developing a massive open-world game like Skyrim means trying to squash innumerable bugs, but man, that's a long list linked above.

For the record, I really liked what I played of Skyrim and didn't encounter any major bugs. I'm just skeptical that game developers won't use systems like Steam Workshop to release unfinished games and expect players to fix the bugs for them. There's good DLC and bad DLC. There are developers who released polished games and others who "release now, patch later." Not every developer abuses the tools they're given, but there will always be a few (like Capcom) that do.

EDIT: And I wouldn't say I have a negative view toward many games, but rather unethical practices in gaming, of which there's currently no shortage thanks to the likes of Zynga, EA, Activision, and Capcom.

EDIT#2: And FWIW, I love the Steam Workshop. I just hope developers don't use it as a free QA department (but some probably will).
 
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tomfoolery_79 said:
I have noticed you have a negative attitude when it comes to a lot of games. Why is that? What was unfinished about Skyrim exactly? A game the magnitude will have bugs, no matter how much QA you do. A million pairs of eyes will find stuff that 100 don't. Gamers adding content through an SDK isn't fixing it...it's adding content. It does make their game better, but that's a brilliant move as someone else has noted. Adding mods/SDK is not laziness (and even if it is) it's a must-have in today's AAA gaming experience. SimCity 4 is still played today 10 years later BECAUSE of the user created community.

Perhaps I misunderstood you.
Click to expand...

He's new to gaming. Only recently did he finish Ocarina of Time.
 
Since it came up again and since I said some game developers were lazy in the another thread I will expound as to why I think that.

tomfoolery_79 said:
I have noticed you have a negative attitude when it comes to a lot of games. Why is that? What was unfinished about Skyrim exactly? A game the magnitude will have bugs, no matter how much QA you do. A million pairs of eyes will find stuff that 100 don't. Gamers adding content through an SDK isn't fixing it...it's adding content. It does make their game better, but that's a brilliant move as someone else has noted. Adding mods/SDK is not laziness (and even if it is) it's a must-have in today's AAA gaming experience. SimCity 4 is still played today 10 years later BECAUSE of the user created community.

Perhaps I misunderstood you.
Click to expand...

I know in my Oblivion moding experience (don't have Skyrim) the game still had thousands of problems after the years of official patch support ended. To quote the community patches:
The Unofficial Oblivion Patch, Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch and Unofficial Official Mods Patch are major mods by Quarn and Kivan that fix over 1,800 bugs (and 70,000 object placement errors) left over even after the latest official patch is applied. These fixes range in importance from trees that seem to float in the air up to conflicts that could cause the game to crash.
Click to expand...
The unofficial Oblivion patches mentioned above were made by 2 (but undoubtedly hard working) people. I've walked around in games before, in my first play through, and seen floating static objects. This is me, singular, Joe Schmoe, me, not thousands of gamers, not hundreds of developers. Neither did I spend hundreds of hours looking specifically for them. Oh yes it's also worth mentioning to even load mods in Oblivion you have to do a dance because Bethesda never fixed it to load right.
In some cases, however, this doesn't work correctly. It now seems fairly certain that this is caused by a bug in Oblivion's ArchiveInvalidation system itself. After more than a year and several official game patches, it seems unlikely that Bethesda will ever correct this bug. This means you will have to use one of several workarounds if you want to install any "replacer" mods.
Click to expand...
You'd think if you aren't going to fix all the bugs in a game you'd at least make it easy for the community to do so but nooooooo. At least they have appeared to wise up on this with Skyrim but it only took how many years?

Then there is TF2 a game that breaks things regularly in patches. We are talking about a game that has an official and ongoing Beta to test with. This is a game which still has errors which haven't been fixed in years. Off the top of my head, an Engineer upgrading can use more metal than the percent it upgrades and that door on the top of the Goldrush spawn you can get stuck in (which I have actually fixed in my own maps).

It is laziness propelled by greed but to expound on that they have X amount of time to get a game ready for release. Even if it's not ready many seem to shove it out the door if it is "close enough". Then they expect to fix it later but never do. I don't expect a perfect product I know most teams work long and hard to get a game out (they will probably never figure out the Nvida crash bug :( even though it did not happen at TF2's release). The thing is if I can find, and fix, some of these things what is their college educated, Gabe Newell is a billionaire from profit which could be spent on bug fixes, problem?

I mean one of the first patches I saw for Skyrim was to patch blocky normal maps on faces. Like artist 101 is to get the face right do they not play their own game to check it?

Then I've also read (I cannot confirm it) that EA has cost cutting and bug inducing hiring practices. They will hire a large team to make a game then fire most of them on completion. Then when a bug surfaces they don't have the original people who made and know the code to fix it. Rather than keep a small team all the time and have a longer development cycle they hire a bunch to "shovel" it out fast, then fire them, then ask people who don't know other parts of the code to fix it. You are asking for problems here.
 
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I thought we were talking about Skyrim. I think you guys are confusing what is a bug and what is an enhancement. "no more blocky faces" is a mod, not a patch/bug fix. The stock faces looked perfectly fine. The mod made them look even better, that is NOT a bug fix. Speaking of my experience on the PC, the worst bug I personally saw was one NPC sitting were there was no visible chair and that only happened once. In fac,t I was shocked by the lack of bugs that I fully expected there would be.

I'm not making this argument for all games, I'm just talking about Skyrim. In Fallout 3 I had several disturbing bugs that really caused me to stop playing. Oblivion was another that got community support. Fallout New Vegas seemed much better. Titan Quest had a laundry list of "bug fixes" by the community.

I'm not saying it doesn't go on. It is a horrible business practice. I was just talking of my personal experience with Skyrim.
 
There has been a couple official patches to the game since I bought it. And yet, I ran into a bug just last night that is preventing me from advancing on the companion questline (verified on the Skyrim wiki - haven't tried the workaround yet).
 
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